KOLOB: The home planet of God, according to Mormons : THE BOOK OF MORMON | Will Howard : Dangerous Minds

After the look at Scientology the other day (can’t see anyone having the cojones of releasing a music based on the Book of Dianetics!) Comes this from Will at Dangerous Minds!!

 

Credit: Dangerous Minds / Bertel Thorvaldsen / Joseph Smith / Reuben Hedlock / Public Domain

Kolob: The home planet of God, according to Mormons

Will Howard

Fri 8 May 2026 23:59, UK

Like pretty much all jokes in the hit musical comedy The Book of Mormon, the song ‘I Believe’ on the Mormon belief system is very simple, yet extremely effective. 

It’s actually quite similar to the South Park gag about Scientology beliefs when you think about it. In both cases, the libertarian in your life’s favourite comedy writers sit back and let the bizarre beliefs of a religion do the hard work for them. Citing the most bizarre parts of both dogmas as a way of making both of them look cretinous.

Among the lines about ancient Jews building boats and sailing to America, the president of the church, Thomas Monson, speaking directly to God and how in 1978, God changed his mind about Black people, is one absolute gem that Elder Price tosses out like it’s absolutely nothing – he says that he believes God lives on a planet called Kolob, that Jesus has his own planet as well, and when someone who believes in him dies, they get their own planet as well.

Yup, this is all completely congruent with Mormon belief systems. Viewed from a certain perspective, Mormonism sounds just as much like a sci-fi acid trip as Scientology, principally because it’s completely obsessed with planets. Or, as they’re referred to in the scripture, “stars”.

The Book of Abraham refers to the star of Kolob being “the nearest to the throne of God”, and since we know today that stars aren’t actually, y’know, habitable, “stars” have been retconned to be the word this particular holy book uses for planets. So, where exactly does this idea come from?

The idea of Kolob is one put forward by Joseph Smith himself, the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saints movement – according to Smith, he purchased a set of Ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls in the mid-1800s, and he transcribed what he found and brought its teachings to the world, first via his newsletter Times and Seasons in 1842, then in The Book of Abraham, and it’s there that Smith lays down one of the key tidbits of information regarding the planet.

To quote The Book of Abraham, it says, “The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of the Earth,” which checks out.

Especially when you take into account the accepted Christian dogma of the world being built in seven days. Or at the very least, six days, then rested on the seventh. Those were Kolob days – to us, they would have taken 6000 years, then 1000 more to move Earth from Kolob to its current position in our Solar System.

This would imply, however, that it can’t be anywhere close to us, despite a number of early Mormon converts declaring that our sun was Kolob. However, according to Smith himself, Kolob is visible from our world. Or at the very least, Methuselah and Abraham saw the planet by looking through Urim and Thummim, a set of seer stones embedded in a pair of spectacles that could also translate all languages. Handy to have around, I’m sure you’d agree.

It just goes to show that, say what you want about Trey Parker and Matt Stone (I will and I do), they are the masters of giving people enough rope to hang themselves with. They just repeated what Mormons actually believe, and now the entire church believes that their music is the work of the devil. Because truly, sometimes the only difference between religion and the rantings of a madman is how many people believe in it.

 I Believe from the Book of Mormon Musical on the 65th Tony Awards.

DANGEROUS MINDS: The barbaric history of early conversion therapy in the UK | Will Howard

The barbaric history of early conversion therapy in the UK

Will Howard

Sat 2 May 2026 14:00, UK

Credit: Dangerous Minds / University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences 

"People have this idea that transgender people are forced or duped into transitioning before they’re ready, which is either a lie, ignorant or stupid. Or, perhaps, all three.

The truth is that NHS waiting lists for gender affirming care are typically between five and seven years long. This is a marked improvement on what it was in the late 2010s, when the waiting list could, in some cases, be up to 15 years.

Yet still, people parrot tales about kids who are pressured into making “irreversible decisions” by NHS doctors, who are allegedly desperate to change their gender for some inexplicable reason. 

The idea that this desire to change people’s genders comes from the NHS is also patently ludicrous. Conversion therapy has been baked into the very fabric of the NHS ever since it was established in 1948, with some of the most harrowing cases coming from the 1960s and ’70s. 

It’s bad enough that anyone ever had to go through this abuse via therapy or prayer, but at this time, the NHS thought it prudent to put some of its most vulnerable people through something even more barbaric. 

When queer and trans kids had been referred to them, more often than not via their teachers, priests and GPs, rather than themselves or their parents, they saw fit to “treat” their “mental illness” with Electric Shock Aversion Therapy. 

In 2025, a number of them spoke to the BBC about their experiences living through this state-sponsored torture, but their story wasn’t exactly rare. 

They were a mere smattering of the 250 people who underwent the same torture at the hands of their own doctors. 

The three survivors who spoke to the BBC were Pauline Collier, Jeremy Gavins and Carolyn Mercer. Each of them didn’t just undergo this treatment; they had this treatment performed on them without their knowledge or consent. 

Mercer, for example, had told her priest at the age of 17 that she felt more female than the male she was assigned at birth, so he’d gone behind her back in order to get her signed up to this shock treatment. 

Gavins bravely detailed his experience in the article, saying that at no point during his time in hospital was he ever prepared or even informed about what he was going in for. He recalled of arriving at Bradford’s Lynfield Mount Hospital, “A male nurse came to see me and said, ‘Come with me’. He said, ‘Take all your clothes off and put them in this locker’. I sat on this chair, he fastened a strap around my left hand, and then did the same with my right hand. He played with a switch, and I got a pain in my arm. He said, ‘Did it hurt?’ and I said, ‘Yes’ and he said, ‘Good, it’s meant to’.”

This is corroborated by Collier, who said, “I don’t think they ever said, ‘We’ll be sitting you in a chair and giving you electric shocks’. I don’t remember that. And I think, at the time, I was just so psychologically vulnerable that I just accepted it all.” That last sentence is the most important of all, I think. 

Only someone truly devoid of empathy would describe this as anything other than the torture of vulnerable people. While the practice has decreased in use, neither conversion therapy nor electroshock therapy is illegal today.”

In my last incarnation for work I was a member of the BAPC (British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists) and still fervently stand by their early approach and policy against conversion therapy (so called) and believe it to be abusive

DANGEROUS MINDS | Gimme Shelter - A grim read on Monday morning . . . ALTAMONT | WILL HOWARD

 MUSIC

Sunset on the 1960s: the four deaths at The Rolling Stones’ Altamont gig

(Credits: Dangerous Minds / Original Posters)

Will Howard

Sun 26 April 2026 12:00, UK

There’s an argument to be made that the best horror movie of 1970 is actually a music documentary. Possibly because 1970 was a rough year for horror cinema, but also because there are few more harrowing music films one can see than Gimme Shelter, the documentary of the catastrophic gig The Rolling Stones played at Altamont the year before. 

Anyone partially familiar with The Rolling Stones knows the story by now. Mick, Keef and chums got in a big row with the public about the ticket prices of their US comeback tour. Jagger, in his infinite wisdom, got bullied in a press conference into saying that they’d host a free concert for all the people who were priced out of seeing them on the tour. The year before, they’d held their proper comeback show for free in Hyde Park, so they had experience in this.

During that gig, the security had been handled by a number of London branches of the Hell’s Angels, so when the time came to play Altamont, they thought they’d do the same. This proved to be a disastrous mistake as the California branches of the Hells Angels were a very different beast from the London branches. They were even more violent, even more racist, and much more likely to not so much solve a problem with violence as act like a Black man existing was a problem, and “solve it” by murdering where they stood. 

This directly led to the most infamous casualty of Altamont, an 18-year-old Black man by the name of Meredith Hunter. Hunter had a checkered past away from the concert and carried a gun for his own safety. As a Black man in 1960s California, this was a smart move. He was also doing absolutely nothing untoward in the concert. He was simply enjoying a rock ‘n’ roll show in the company of his white girlfriend. This was completely unacceptable to the Angels. 

They pestered him all night, and after he tried to move away to get a better view, a biker punched him in the face. Hunter tried to run and turned to find several bikers sprinting towards him. He pulled his gun. The resulting stabbing was caught on camera and is shown to the mortified Stones in Gimme Shelter. The glint of the abhorrent, racist’s knife in an errant spotlight will stay with me for a long, long time. Hunter could have been saved had he been airlifted away in the Stones’ helicopter, but their management shouldn’t have let them. 

A murder like this would be an unconscionable tragedy. This was only the most high-profile death at Altamont. One of the truly horrific deaths on site. 

Who else died at The Rolling Stones’ gig at Altamont? 

While the death of Meredith Hunter is a horrifying act of racism, the first death at Altamont is a very different kind of horrible. Instead, this is one case of a life snuffed out because of youthful stupidity. The festival site had a canal adjoining it. As the first band on the bill started playing in the early morning, one attendee of the show, 18-year-old Leonard Kryszak, decided to go swimming in said canal, giving the finger to a police officer waving frantically at him not to get in the water. 

Turns out, this was one of the vanishingly few occasions that day that someone in charge of keeping the public safe would actually try to keep the public safe. The canal had a current. One much faster and choppier than Kryszak was expecting. That and the shock of the freezing cold water caused him to drown. He was found two hours after he went into the water, while Santana were playing on the main stage. He was due to turn 19 the next day. 

Even after the gig was finished, death was still abundant. Rather than brave the traffic home the same night, a number of people stayed the night on site. Two of these people made a fire for warmth and sat together, possibly reflecting on the absolutely putrid vibes that came off the whole concert and wondering why their acid trip was going so horrifically wrong. They were hit by a car that swerved off the road on the way out of the speedway and were killed instantly. The driver was never found. 

You might have heard the myth that, yes, there were four deaths at Altamont, but there were also four births there too. Sunrise, sunset, the cosmic ballet continues and all that? Yeah. No. That was part of The Rolling Stones’ desperate PR campaign to save some face after their shoddy standards killed four innocent people. The births were made up, but the deaths were very, very real. 

Not only that, they were very, very preventable too. 

 Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles. With Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor.

Gimme Shelter Blu-ray (Amazon) https://amzn.to/4bVtit1 Gimme Shelter Blu-ray (Criterion) https://criterion.com/films/637

The Forgotten Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 | Dangerous Minds (Will Howard)

 Speaking of Interesting !! 😳

German American Bund: the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden

Will Howard

Thu 19 February 2026 21:00, UK For the past decade, a certain breed of dewey-eyed American liberal has been wailing that the current descent into fascism their country is trying to fight back against “isn’t what my country stands for!” 

It may sound like I’m being a little unfair to someone who is broadly speaking on the right side of history, and you might not be far off the mark. One need only take a look at both sides of the Atlantic and see that in this moment, people really don’t have much of a problem with the rise of fascism. While it’s a low bar to clear, speaking out against the evils being committed by governments against their people is one that a worrying number of people are failing to do.

Yet the people handwringing about this “not being the country they recognise” are naive at best and ignorant at worst. Especially in America, this is nothing new, and I’m not just talking about the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan being a repurposed Ronald Reagan catchphrase.

No, America as it currently is, with a dictator in the White House and a Gestapo on the streets murdering with impunity as a way of keeping the public too terrified to act against them, is one that a much larger contingent of Americans have always wanted.

This goes back a lot further than the 1980s, as well, and back to a time when most Americans considered their country to have been at its peak. After all, the tide of the Second World War was turned by the USA joining the war (fucking eventually) and fighting for freedom against tyranny, right? We’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for Uncle Sam socking Hitler right in his stupid fucking moustache, right? Everyone agreed that what was happening in Europe was a bad thing…right?

Nope, and there were a lot more of these fascists around than you’d think.

( Dangerous Minds / U.S. Military – Department of Defense)

So, who organised the Nazi rally in New York City?

The truth is that there was a small, yet incredibly vocal minority of people who weren’t just opposed to joining the Second World War because of an aversion to joining foreign wars, but because they believed in what Hitler was doing.

The most vocal group with these beliefs were the German American Bund, an organisation dedicated to spreading the word of Nazism in the United States. They spent years trying to get their tendrils into all facets of German-American society.

They strong-armed German-American news outlets into publishing pro-Hitler news articles. They pressured elected representatives against the 1933 anti-German boycott. After electing the German-born American Fritz Julius Kuhn as their leader, they began expanding their membership until the peak of their powers came in 1939, when they were able to fill Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for their “Pro-America Rally”. A vehemently antisemitic rally that saw a stage set consisting of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by two swastikas.

The German American Bund fell apart quickly after that. It was disbanded officially when the US joined the war, but years before that, Kuhn was found to be embezzling funds from the organisation for himself. Which goes to show just how much the whole crusade really meant to him. However, just because that specific organisation fell apart and the US fought against the Nazis in World War II doesn’t mean that one terrifying fact isn’t true today.

They would love the direction their country is going in today.

Today’s story from Will at DANGEROUS MINDS is worth a read

 

Alicia Machado: the Miss Universe winner who was bullied by Donald Trump

Will Howard

Sun 15 February 2026 21:00, UK

Donald Trump owning the Miss Universe Organization should be as absurd and foul a concept as Jeffrey Epstein running the Girl Guides.

Speaking of Dangerous Minds! Will Howard looks at the man who predicted Trump rise to power

 

Ingersoll Lockwood: the novelist who predicted the terrifying Donald Trump dynasty

Living through 2016 was an experience that fundamentally broke a lot of people’s belief that anything could make sense if given enough time and thought. That sense would most often prevail, and fundamentally, people were good even if they needed to be given a few chances to get there. 

Then Donald Trump was elected President of the United States . . . . . . . read on here

Will Howard

The Novelist who predicted the Terrifying Trump Dynasty

EDVARD MUNCH - Dangerous Minds, dangerous treatments | Will Howard

Dangerous Minds looks at ‘The Scream’s’ master Edvard Munch

Read on what Will has to say about Munch at the link (above)

The transformative electroshock treatment of Edvard Munch

Will Howard

Sat 31 January 2026 23:00, UK

How Edvard Munch's The Scream Became an Icon

Sotheby's

Blues Myths - Blind Lemon Jefferson by Will Howard | DANGEROUS MINDS

This is really worth a read . . . . . . I guess it never really struck me before that Robert Johnson’s disappearance and much lauded return suddenly 9sic) able to play like a master being from a meeting with the Devil and a pact struck down at the crossroads being a marketing ploy was so much better than the days [months years?] spent learninging to master his instrument and that it should enter the popular zeitgeist and became a central part of the myth still popular today. The death of legendary blues man Blind Lemon might also be such . . .spread to encourage sales by person or person unknown and this never occurred to me either. read on here

Did Blind Lemon Jefferson die from poisoned coffee?

Will Howard

Does the ghost of Claude Monet haunt a Cleveland art gallery? | WILL HOWARD | DANGEROUS MINDS

Well no! As there’s no such thing but this is an interesting read from our Will Howard poverties at Dangerous Minds

Dangerous Minds on Monet’s ghost

Love this shot and the story allegedly taken before the show opened and was therefore not  open to the public!

Portrait photograph of the French impressionist painter Claude Monet by the early master Nadar (Credit: Nadar)